“You can start by peeling all of
these,” Paul said, gesturing toward the sink that contained a small mountain of
apples. Maybe a bushel? I thought, which pulled in a scrap of song:
I
love you, a bushel and a peck
A
bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck
I opened my mouth to sing this, but stopped
myself. The L-word had not yet been exchanged between this man and me, although
I’d felt it forming on my lips for the past few weeks.
Stay focused, I admonished myself. My new
boyfriend was a tall, blond Swedish-Norwegian hybrid, a Lutheran transplant
from Minnesota, which by default meant he was a canner. A bookshelf next to the
front door of his apartment housed jars of green, red, purple, and pale yellow—pickles,
salsa, spaghetti sauce, plum sauce, applesauce, and pear ginger jam—products I
was the recipient of by our third date.
And now I’d accepted his invitation to
make a friend’s apple windfall into something useful. Of course, I turned the
opportunity into a girlfriend proving ground. How could I compete with the
family of women he must have back home, peeling and slicing and baking and
canning their asses off until their basements could sustain them through a
nuclear holocaust?
“Sure,” I said breezily, taking the
vegetable peeler he held out to me. My mother’s idea of a home-cooked meal was
a jar of Ragú unscrewed and poured over a pile of spaghetti while frozen
broccoli pieces defrosted in the microwave. The only preserved food in the
house was a block of Velveeta. As for myself, I wouldn’t bake as long as I lived
alone, because I would eat one cookie, and then the whole batch. I prayed I wouldn’t
have to end up admitting this to Paul in the name of modern intimacy.
As I picked up the first piece of
fruit and ran the peeler’s blade along its mottled red skin, metal clanged
behind me. I turned to see Paul set on the stove a pot a small child could hide
inside, and on the counter beside it, a set of tools I can’t identify: a metal
cone dotted all over with tiny holes, a pointed wooden pestle inside of it, and
dark green plastic pieces in various shapes and sizes.
I was supposed to meet his good friends
for the first time that night at their house for dinner, but I’d rather have
just gone back home alone. The truth is that I sometimes hate getting to know
people. I like people. Or at least some of them. But I hate the process, the
parading around of interests and the asking of endless questions. My inner
pessimist just sees the dead end of this—the way more information brings us
closer to each other’s inadequacies.
I needed a break from this early-relationship
phase of learning, explaining, and introducing. Sometimes I wished I could just
fast-forward to five years in when we didn’t have to be on our best behavior
anymore. When I told Paul, “I’m a moody person,” I wanted him to know what I
was talking about instead of saying, “Really? I can’t picture that. You seem so
happy all the time.”
I would have to get everything out
in the open soon. I just wished he could already know all this and I could skip
the explication part.
* * *
Like the fact that at 20 years and
counting, my eating disorder was easily my longest relationship.
Its many guises and attendant rituals
permeated everywhere I had ever lived. I made a space for it in my living room,
when it told me my six-mile run wasn’t enough, so I had to do some emergency calisthenics
on the floor to redeem myself. It haunted my closets and dresser drawers,
taunting me to try on jeans from 10 years ago to see how fat I was now in
comparison.
In the kitchen, it would hover over me at
the fridge, whispering judgments and neurotic calculations about what I already
ate or was going to eat for dinner. At times it lapsed into a permissive
personality, calling me to eat for hours at a time on the couch, promising
escape but delivering only shame. Always there in the mirror, it harangued me
about my inner thighs’ overly cozy relationship with one another.
And in bed with a man, it was an awkward
third party, stabbing through any pleasure I felt with a running commentary on
how repulsive the little roll below my bellybutton must look.
Addiction and intimacy cannot mutually
co-exist. In each of my attempts at real love, my disease eventually won out. In
every relationship, I used whatever energy I had left after obsessing over
food, not eating, binge-eating, compulsively exercising, scrutinizing my body,
and hating what I saw—which meant I had only a shred of a self
available to another person. I thought my big passions and intense personality automatically
connected me to others, but I was holding out in the ways that truly counted.
As long as I let addiction take up
residence in my heart, I could shut out even the people who wanted to be
closest to me. When boyfriends told me I was beautiful, I would dismiss the
compliment, pointing out the stretch marks that had battle-scarred my body
since I was 17.
One night when I was 21, the first man I
lived with came home to find me violently destroying a pizza I had originally
intended to have for dinner. A scrap of latent anorexic thinking had dislodged
itself from my subconscious and floated to the surface, telling me I was too
fat to deserve to eat. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” my boyfriend repeated,
trying to calm me, but his words were white noise against the louder drone of
self-destruction in my head.
While living in Spain a few years later, I
canceled a date with my British boyfriend because I was homesick and just
wanted to binge in peace in my apartment. No one could ever find out about this
secret ritual, so I made up an excuse about needing rest after a long workday.
When he yelled into the phone, “You always
need alone time!” it struck me just how easy the choice between food or another
person always was.
At 28, I was driving my then-fiancé to
dinner when he pulled out an empty cookie package I had hidden in my glove box.
And then a bottle of weight loss pills, the mortifying kind that extract the
fat from the food you eat, which you then expel into a toilet—if you’re lucky
enough to get there first.
“Maybe if you didn’t eat this stuff that
makes you hate yourself, you wouldn’t feel like you need to take these,” he
said quietly, trying to make sense of the weird evidence juxtaposed in his
hands.
They all were trying to help in their way,
but I only retreated further.
* * *
At 33 and a few months after my first
canning lesson, I was committed to my Midwestern Lutheran Paul, who made the
rest of the world fall away when he interrupted a set with his band to serenade
me with Coldplay’s “Green Eyes,” and who told me I was the best thing that had
ever happened to him.
I wanted to believe him. But really, I was
like a philandering spouse, shamefully wrapped up in a relationship on the side,
one that would always entangle me by sheer virtue of its longevity and
familiarity.
I knew how all this sounded. Why not just
stop doing it? I loved this man, but a scrap of addiction lingered in the
background, a borderline-personality, lipstick-smeared girlfriend yelling,
“You’re nothing without me! If you leave me, I’ll kill myself!”
I’d been trying to break up with my eating
disorder for most of its existence, but like any codependent relationship worth
its salt, it would not be fooled by any half-assed attempts to cut ties.
When the same fiancé who found the
contraband in my car accused me of being an addict, I went to a 12-step meeting
solely to prove that I wasn’t. What I saw there astounded me: regular people,
in various stages of wreckage and repair, laying bare their deepest
vulnerabilities and most humiliating struggles in order to be free of them. It took
all the courage I had just to walk into the room and stay seated while my heart
pounded the entire hour, and I scurried away before anyone could talk to me.
But these people knew something about living that I clearly didn’t.
So over the next three years, I found
myself back in that room again and again, even after my fiancé left me. I
slowly learned the brave work of sharing my story and working the steps, and I
felt my eating disorder start to loosen its grip on my life.
And then, Paul wanted me to move in with
him. While packing up my apartment,
I appraised every chair, photograph, and houseplant. Some sacrifices were
immediately obvious: clothes I hadn’t worn in months or years, undergrad
textbooks, art projects I would never finish. Paul’s leather couch was nicer
than my futon, and his desk should replace my rickety IKEA table.
But my eating disorder wouldn’t be so easy
to leave behind. The disease was still there—if slightly diminished—and now claimed
squatters’ rights. Letting it stay meant always having an excuse to not be
fully present, a twisted insurance policy against getting hurt.
Maybe this was just the best that I could
get.
* * *
A few months before moving day, my body declared
a mutiny. I’d tried to ignore bursitis in my right hip for half a year, but
eventually the burning pain intensified. Running became impossible, and even my
walk became a limp at times. The little bit of rest I allowed myself evolved
into chronic exhaustion. I would come home after working 10-hour days at my
teaching job and lie down on the couch, too drained to move. Over the next few
months, I had to resort to my biggest work trousers—once again—and my bras barely
contained me.
I desperately wanted to be the cool
girlfriend, transcendent of such clichéd afflictions. Yet I was biding my time,
anticipating the nervous energy that always returned, which I counted on to
fuel my next workout craze and weight loss. To spare Paul, I’d vowed to stop
voicing negative comments about myself, but a private ticker tape still ran
inside my head.
I tried telling myself that I needed to
exercise over an hour every day, and go to bed hungry—whatever it took to transform
my body back into a carefully controlled machine. But I couldn’t summon the mania
anymore, and I realized that for the first time, I didn’t want to. Instead, I
spent my time with a partner who knew about my chaotic past but who didn’t cast
me in the same tired script I’d followed for so long. As we hiked mountain trails,
drew up a bucket list of travel destinations, and planned our home together, I had
no energy left for old compulsions.
Sure, my body got a little bigger. But
life was bigger now, too, and I refused to let the relics of addiction take up any
more space in my home, my heart, and my mind.
The hard truth is that the moment we
invite an eating disorder to live inside us, we also create a room for it that
cannot be destroyed. Still, there is hope: each day we can decide to keep the room’s
door shut. This is the power of a quiet courage, one that leads us down the
path of change through the tiny brave actions that we must choose, moment by
moment, day after day.
* * *
Before moving day, Paul took me back home to
Minnesota to meet his family. On an especially humid afternoon we went
swimming, and someone had the idea of a diving contest.
“Now, it’s whoever does the best animal!”
Paul’s niece yelled.
My heart started pounding. I looked up at
the board, casting its long shadow over the protective waters that hid my
rippled thighs. Here was a group of people who had already welcomed and loved
me, who simply wanted me in their lives, and who didn’t give a damn about my
body fat percentage.
When it was my turn, I hopped up on the
board. I could feel my butt jiggling as I did a slapstick walk to the edge, but
I was laughing too hard to really care. Flapping my arms like a broken
marionette, I screeched out a loud “Ca-caaaw!” before stag-jumping into the
water.
I realized I’d brought the body I am
supposed to have, along with a new sense of confidence that no one cared what
it looked like.
Luckily, it was easy to disguise the tears
on my wet face when I came up for air. Because I wasn’t worrying about
cellulite, I only felt joy when I heard Paul’s little niece proclaim, “You’re
the winner!”
* * *
But the ending of any relationship, even
an abusive one, is tinged with nostalgia and doubt. As I unpacked boxes of photo
albums in my new home with Paul, I found a picture of me at 13. I am standing
on the shore of Lake Erie in a high-cut, one-piece purple swimsuit, self-consciously
pushing my narrow hips forward to exaggerate my drum-tight abs. “See?” a little
voice whispered. “We were so good together. Look at all I did for you.”
I paused, inhaling deeply, then closed the door in my
mind and ignored the muffled protests as I walked away.
Post-script
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